The Old Faithful of ICANN-related sites, ICANNwatch, has unveiled its
facelift: a Slashdot-like news and comment forum. Good move. Between
this and the New Faithful of ICANN-related sites, Bret Fausett's
stellarICANN Blog, the
roving_reporter is could just about hang up his hat. Heh--well,
maybe not...

The new ICANNwatch and the ICANN Blog both serve functions that ICANN
itself could and should be doing: providing a useful forum for input
and dialog, and providing timely, informative, and neutral news on its
activities. Unfortunately, ICANN's failure in this regard has been
singularly and consistently spectacular: witness, only most recently, the
prompt posting the testimony of Maximum Leader Mike
Roberts and CoB Vint
Cerf before the House and Senate committees, as opposed to the curious
absence of Boardmember Karl Auerbach's Senate
testimony. (For a larf, see this rather candid "offtopic" assessment
of that inconsistency.)

Kudos to Bret and the maintainers of ICANN watch -- in particular,
Michael Froomkin -- for their efforts.

CIRA, Canada's new admin for the .ca ccTLD,
has published its requirements
regarding who is eligible to register a domain: Canadian citizens, permanent
residents, legal representatives, corporations, trusts, partnerships,
associations, trade unions, political parties, various kinds of educational
institutions, libraries, indian "bands," aboriginals, the government,
registrants of trademark and official marks, and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth
II and her successors.

An impressive coalition billing itself as the NGO and Academic
ICANN Study (NAIS) has written a remarkable open letter
to Carl Bildt, who is slated to chair ICANN's At-Large
Membership Study Committee (ALMSC). In it, NAIS has made an
initial list of data and documents it wants access to: server
logs from the systems used in ICANN's and election.com's handling of
the election, registration records "of at least some information
collected from users," mailing records, voting records, technical
specifications, financial records, and "internal and external
communication of ICANN officers and staff regarding the election" --
pretty much the whole shootin' match. The letter goes out of its way
to stress that NAIS is specifically not requesting personally
identifiable data; however, it does say that ICANN should "make all of
this election data available not only to the undersigned researchers,
but to other research efforts as well." (For ravings on some of these
subjects, see roving_reporter journals 1, 2, and 3passim.)

ICANN has also invited former boardmember Pindar Wong and Charles
Costello, director of the Carter Center's Democracy Program, to join
the ALMSC as vice-chairs. The roving_reporter takes a dim view
of these invitations, particularly the latter. The Carter Center's statement on the MAL
elections got off to a shaky start by plopping out a real howler:
"ICANN 'keeps the Internet running' and assigns high-level names and"
-- perish the thought -- "through registrars, e-mail
addresses." More substantively, despite the CC's efforts to hedge
their language ("reasonably," "subject to further review of the
available balloting data," "based on a limited monitoring of
registration," etc., etc.), the letter far overshot its ill-defined
scope on key points. For example, it duly repeated ICANN's claims
about spikes in request rates being the cause of registration server
problems -- but failed to note that the server had been throttled down to process no more requests
than ICANN's staff could support. (The CC agreed to answer a number of
questions from the roving_reporter but, on receiving the
questions, fell silent.) Without casting aspersions on Mr. Costello's
integrity, we nevertheless doubt that this record suggests his
contributions to the ALMSC will be optimal.

ICANN has also appointed a former NSF, DoC, and electronics
trade-group staffer, Denise Michel, as Executive Director of the
ALMSC.

All very bottom-up, isn't it?

Only fools make predictions. But since the roving_reporter
is -- nay, takes pride in being -- profoundly foolish, we
predict that ICANN will be rather less than forthcoming with the
requested materials. Specifically:

ICANN will not release server logs for the machine on which its broken election "front end" ran because
they probably didn't archive them;

ICANN will not release webserver logs on the pretext that
requesting IP numbers (or possibly looked-up DNS entries) can in
some cases obviously be correlated with specific individuals;

ICANN will not release MAL-associated financial records,
because doing so could reveal ways in which it uses
project-specific revenues to cover its general operating costs;

ICANN will not release mailing records, because those records
consist, in large part, of stacks of returned envelopes -- which
of course would reveal personally identifiable information;

and ICANN will not release internal correspondence because it
would be too damn embarassing.

Bright and early Thursday morning, Billy Tauzin's House Committee
on Energy and Commerce will hold hearings,
titled Is ICANN's New Generation of Internet Domain Name Selection
Process Thwarting Competition?, which "will focus on ICANN's recently
announced selections of registry operators for new top level domains."
ICANN hasn't seen fit to note this among their announcements.

[Crikey, yet another addendum (these things are killing
me...): A roving_reader points out that ICANN's Correspondence page
even includes a section devoted to the U.S. House Committee on
Commerce. As noted in this space, though,
that page is the informational equivalent of a Potemkin village. As
ever, thanks for the pointer.]

Several sources present at the ICANN-Studienkreis 2-3
February meeting in Zurich confirm that, in Marc Holitscher's panel
discussion on the Membership at Large, Chief Policy Poobah Andrew
McLaughlin stated that the MAL "doesn't exist" anymore. Evidently,
ICANN staff is flogging the claim that the MAL was just a temporary
mechanism for "selecting" regional directors for the board -- and
claim, further, that this was the plan from the very beginning, it's
all in the documents, &c., &c.

If indeed that's been the case all along, then why don't any of the
MAL-related resolutions -- from Berlin
(27 May 1999), Santiago
(26 August 1999), LA
(4 November 1999), Cairo
(10 March 2000), or Yokohama
(16 July 2000) -- mention it? And why did Mclaughlin express
concern that the MAL was being "hijacked" at the Berkman Center MAL
panel discussion in the Pressing
Issues II sessions prior to ICANN's November 2000 meeting in
Marina Del Rey? Why is there no mention of it in ICANN's grant
proposal to the Markle Foundation? And why hasn't ICANN's MAL site made any mention
of the MAL's transience -- not in the schedule, not in the
FAQ, not in the rules? And, really, why
would the FAQ include this?

Do I have to renew my membership every year?

Yes. Members will be asked to reconfirm their membership data
every year.

Reconfirm their membership data. That means "change of
address." Not: "sign up again."

Every once in a while, the roving_reporter's really gotta
call a spade a spade: Andrew McLaughlin, ICANN's self-styled Chief
Policy Officer, wouldn't know the truth if it hit him in the ass with
a banjo. But it shouldn't be personal: he's just doing his job. For
ICANN. And against you.

[Addendum: McLaughlin writes (not necessarily in response):

To reprise what I said in Zuerich: The At Large Membership does
not exist in the form Hans [Klein, of CPSR] wants it to exist. At
the moment, it exists in a state of suspension: Under the Bylaws,
the membership was constituted for one purpose and one purpose
only: to choose 5 Directors in 2000. After that, the At Large
Study is supposed to figure out what sort of role and function it
should have in the future. But, of course, there haven't been any
registrations since July, and no activations since September. So
it can't be a surprise to anyone that the membership database lies
dormant, pending the outcome of the study.

Too clever by half. First and foremost, it should be noted
that Hans Klein is far from alone in being dissatisfied with ICANN's
handling of the MAL. In fact, the roving_reporter would be
curious to know of anyone who is happy with it. Secondly,
roving_readers would do well to review, for example, the MAL FAQ -- written, one
assumes, by ICANN staff -- to see whether its language supports the
picture McLaughlin's presents. If it doesn't, then ICANN has only
itself to blame.

McLaughlin sees the paucity of explicit statements that the MAL
should continue to function post-election as a positive and
affirmative justification for icing it. But another explanation -- one
that's much more sensible -- is that people assumed it would
continue: that MALers would elect directors, that the directors would
remain accountable and responsive through continuous input, and so on.
That understanding is quite suited to an organization that purports to
be "bottom-up"; McLaughlin's pharisaical understanding is not.

And for someone who claims to adhere so vigorously to the letter of
the by-law,
his claim that "the At Large Study is supposed to figure out what sort
of role and function it should have in the future" is tendentious. In
point of fact, the current by-laws say the study will determine (note
the priorities):

Whether the ICANN Board should include "At Large" Directors;

If so, how many such Directors there should be;

How any such "At Large" Directors should be selected, including
consideration of at least the following options: selection by an
"At Large" membership; appointment by the existing Board;
selection or appointment by some other entity or entities; and any
combination of those options;

If selection by an "At Large" membership is to be used, the
processes and procedures by which that selection will take place;
and

last and also least...

What the appropriate structure, role and functions of an "At
Large" membership should be.

That last question depends on the answers to the previous ones. If
the study were to determine that there should be no MAL directors, or
that there should be some but they shouldn't be elected, then it's
hard to imagine what role or function the MAL would serve, now, isn't
it?

But perhaps most noteworthy is McLaughlin's pedantic tone: he
understands and is satisfied; Klein doesn't and is a malcontent. If
that's how ICANN's Chief of Policy regards the Chairman of the Board
of CPSR, imagine if you will, roving_worm, how he looks upon
you.]

RESOLVED [EC01.6], that until such time as the Board can further
consider the matter, the Vice President and General Counsel is
authorized temporarily to waive terms of the Registry Agreement
between ICANN and Network Solutions, Inc. (also known as VeriSign
Global Registry Services) as necessary to permit blocking of initial
registration through non-testbed means of second-level domains within
the .com, .net, and .org top-level domains intended for use within
VeriSign's multilingual testbed.

It took the roving_reporter a while to parse this Faustrollian
jewel of bureaucratese, but we did it. Roughly translated, it says
something like:

Until the board figures comes up with a damage-control plan, Louis
Touton pretty much has carte blanche to stomp out
multilingual-testbed-style domains we don't like.

So what's the damage? Well, roving_readers may remember our
20 January item, "Hawaii 2.0," in which we
tried to make sense of the multilingual morass. Rising up from that
morass, like the creature from the black lagoon, was the specter of
RACE -- the Row-based ASCII-Compatible Encoding standard, a kludge for
using ASCII to encode non-Latin characters.

To organizations whose very existence depends on the current
ASCII-only DNS architecture -- NSI (now VGRS), which is desperately
squeezing every last cent out of it, and ICANN, whose raison
d'être seems to be the surbordination of substantive technical
progress to venal intellectual property interests -- RACE is a dream
come true. It offers a way to service select Asian markets without
muddying their hands by coordinating a coherent restructuring of DNS in
a way that would actually meet the needs of a global linguistic
environment.

And yet RACE is ASCII-"compatible"; that means RACE-"encoded" domains
are ASCII. As VGRS's own Multilingual DNS FAQ states,
"domain.com for a given language will be stored as bq--gde6djht.com."
Since RACE describes an
algorithm, the converse is true: bq--gde6djht will be rendered as
"domain" in a given language. Which means that someone really clever
might register in ASCII domains that, when RACEd, correspond
to, say, famous names or trademarks in a given language. And
they might do so outside of the VGRS/ICANN "testbed" -- as one
would register any other domain (and for a lot less than the $199 VGRS
is charging). If so, then those domains aren't provisional: they're
the real thing.

If indeed what we surmise sparked the Exec Comm's open-ended
mandate for VP Louis Touton, such a hack -- beyond being seriously
slick -- could pose immense problems for ICANN, its UDRP, and so-called
"cybersquatting" in general. Even the literal one-to-one.com
correspondence of trademarks to domains has proven to be profoundly
controversial. "Substring" issues (e.g., verizonreallysucks.com) have
proven even more troublesome. But the idea that trademarks encompass
strings encoded with one standard but parsed with another -- for
example, that "Disney" also covers 64 case-insensitive binary
expressions such as "010001000110100101110011011011100110010101111001"
-- might be a tad too high-concept for even the most zealous
proponents of "intellectual property" claims. But if a trademark
registered in ASCII doesn't apply to binary, then why should it apply
to RACE -- or to any other non-obvious encoding scheme?

All post-converted name parts that contain internationalized
characters begin with the string "bq--". (Of course, because host
name parts are case-insensitive, this might also be represented
as "Bq--" or "bQ--" or "BQ--".) The string "bq--" was chosen
because it is extremely unlikely to exist in host parts
before this specification was produced. As a historical note, in
late August 2000, none of the second-level host name parts in any
of the .com, .edu, .net, and .org top-level domains began with
"bq--"; there are many tens of thousands of other strings of three
characters followed by a hyphen that have this property and could
be used instead. The string "bq--" will change to other strings
with the same properties in future versions of this draft.
[emphasis added]

But Hoffman's subsequent remarks implicitly acknowledge that this
scheme is basically braindead, when he recommends that zone admins had
better not name any hosts in ways that might confuddle RACE-based resolvers:

Note that a zone administrator might still choose to use "bq--" at
the beginning of a host name part even if that part does not
contain internationalized characters. Zone administrators SHOULD
NOT create host part names that begin with "bq--" unless those
names are post-converted names. Creating host part names that
begin with "bq--" but that are not post-converted names may cause
two distinct problems. Some display systems, after converting the
post-converted name part back to an internationalized name part,
might display the name parts in a possibly-confusing fashion to
users. More seriously, some resolvers, after converting the
post-converted name part back to an internationalized name part,
might reject the host name if it contains illegal characters.

ICANN, the "technical coordinating body" of the internet,
approved this standard as the way to meet the needs of East Asia. And
now that the flaw in this scheme is revealing itself, the Executive
Committee of ICANN's board has effectively suspended its agreement
with NSI and thereby granted its Veep free rein to put in a fix.

[Addendum: The roving_reporter's surmise was correct.
According to the draft
Minutes of [MINC's] Registration Policy WG Meeting of 30 January, "19000
names [were] registered as pure ASCII"; the registry deleted them, but they
were "re-registered seconds later." As always, thanks to the diligent people
who turn up these gems of documentation.]

The roving_reporter is very pleased to report that,
through dogged persistence and the kindness of strangers, he has
obtained a videotape of the lost MDR2K IANA-ccTLD meeting (see our
coverage here and here). The Berkman posse was unable to
videotape the session due to an unexplained last-minute switcheroo of
venue; but an observer caught the drama -- and dramatic it was -- on
tape. A hearty thanks to all who helped us obtain a copy.

[Addendum: One roving_reader has suggested making the
four MP3s available via HTTP as well to facilitate streaming. Done. And another roving_reader
with a big heart and bigger pipes has mirrored them at internet.com both
as separate MP3 files (1, 2, 3, 4)
and as a
single RealAudio stream with minimized background hum. Hats off to both
of you.] [Addendum 2: Simon Higgs has kindly provided another mirror
here Hats off to him as well.]

Preciselyin accordance with
prophecy, yesterday ICANN's Executive Committee held a
teleconference in which the numero-uno item was "Authorizing repayment
of loan" -- that's terse for the outstanding $150,000 loan from Cisco.
Unlike MCI/WorldCom, 3Com, and Deutsche Telekom -- all of which have
obligingly deferred repayment until summer or fall -- Cisco wanted its
money back by 2 February. ICANN continues to present these loans,
which were executed between July and October of 1999, as "one year
unsecured loans" (though the link they
offer as if to substantiate that claim is to a boilerplate loan agreement);
as noted in this space, ICANN's public
explanations of the terms of these loans differed remarkably from the
disclosures it made to the IRS in its application for 501(c)(3) status.

The end of the month is as good a time as any for the
roving_reporter to set an example for our fine friends at ICANN
by owning up. We were way off with our
speculations about Don Heath, which one very well-informed
roving_reader dismissed as a "conspiracy theory." We chafed at
that description; it chafed back; we lost. Then again, other
well-informed sources noted that ICANNauts were publicly scoffing at
our report about Carl Bildt -- that
someone so prominent would never take a job at ICANN. Heh.

In every case, we hasten to thank our sources and correspondents:
it's you what keep us honest.

[Addendum: The roving_reporter seems to have been
wrong about being wrong about Heath, which is to say he was right
about Heath: rumor has it that ISOC is nominating him for a seat
on ICANN's board.]

Well, not really...but no way can the roving_reporter keep
up with Bret Fausett's ICANN blog, which
has quickly become the preeminent source of timely news about
the activities of ICANN and its alphabeticalistical
infrastructure-cum-suburban sprawl of working groups, supporting orgs,
committees, constituencies, and divers other bureaucratic chinoiserie.

Fausett is doing what ICANN, what with its soporific mantra about
"openness" and "transparency," should have been doing all along:
maintaining a fast and accurate log of their doings, peppered with
links to primary sources. Had ICANN done so, though, they likely
wouldn't have lasted as long as they have -- which may make clear why
they've chosen instead to dole out nanospoonfuls of legalistic
boilerplate in the form of press releases, spiced up with the very occasional morsel of "correspondence." And an alarming
amount of that on Friday afternoons, no less.

Note that ICANN is now hiring a "Public
Affairs and Communications Director." And a "Policy Analyst," too.

Given that each of these jobs pays $40-80K per year, that's an
interesting move because ICANN's budget for FY
2000-2001 line-itemed $1,611,000 for "personnel" -- only $11K more
than the $1,600,000 line-itemed for "executive and staff compensation"
in the FY
1999-2000 budget. With associated costs, these new positions could
run ICANN a cool $150-250K/year easy. Now, where did ICANN get that
kind of money after they drew up the budget on 6 June? Surely not from
the ccTLDs, whose admirable recalcitrance reduced ICANN's
revenues by a substantial chunk of $1,355,000.
And certainly not from gTLD registrar contributions, which have
flatlined at $535K/Q (1999 listing are here,
2000 FQ1 is here).

The roving_reporter bets it came, in accordance with prophesy, from the
surplus revenues drawn from new gTLD application fee. If that's
correct, then ICANN's willingness to commit some of that windfall to
an ongoing expense may suggest that new rounds of gTLD applications
will be coming in the foreseeable future. And it also suggests that their
public budgets, like their public announcements, are but a veneer. If only
the excellent Mr. Fausett had access to the financial gruesomes as well.
Not that we'd really wish such a fate on him, mind you...

Dutch columnist and anti-$cientology activist Karin
Spaink has published some
remarkable accounts of the appeals trial of Scientology versus
[Zenon] Panoussis -- her partner's appeal of a Swedish court's
1998 ruling in the
cult's favor. That ruling awarded the Co$ a measly US$2,000 in
"damages" incurred when Panoussis publicly posted some Co$ copyrighted
"religious" twaddle on the net. Unfortunately, the court also awarded
the Co$ a more formidable US$150,000 in legal fees; Panoussis has been
all but penniless since, because the Co$ has garnished his wages in --
in our opinion -- its ongoing effort to destroy him. The Co$ had
asked the court to force Panoussis to pony up $2 million in
legal fees.

The spectacular battles on the net between the Co$ and its
opponents established the framework for many subsequent abuses of
"intellectual property" claims to silence critics of corporate and
political activities.

Total Telecomreports
that ICANN Maximum Leader Mike Roberts, in a talk at the twenty-third
Pacific Telecommunications Council conference, broached two of ICANN's
more delicate subjects: "multilingual" DNS -- that is, domain names
encoded in ways more suited to orthographies around the world than
ASCII's C-ration
approach (i.e., A-Z, 0-9, and "-") -- and ICANN's relationship to the
ccTLDs.

Those two subjects are becoming intertwined like lovers in Oshima's
Realm of the
Senses, but not for any particularly good reason. It's mostly
attributable to ICANN's clix Americana worldview, wherein all
things un-American get lumped together under "miscellaneous" ("the
signpost of ignorance" as Marcel
Mauss put it) -- as expressed, for example, in the organizational
dichotomy within ICANN between the gTLD Registry "Constituency"
(one member:
VeriSign Global Registry Services, née NSI) and the ccTLD Registries Constituency
(approximately 244
members).

The roving_reporter has dealt with ICANN vis-à-vis
the ccTLDs in detail, but he has strenuously avoided plunging into the
kaleidoscopic world of multilingual DNS. Oh well -- here goes...

In January 2000, Nunames, the
commercially oriented ccTLD registrar for Niue's ".nu", announced a
multilingual test, but -- a minor detail -- didn't specify which
character encoding standard their extended system would use. There are
many, e.g., DOS Codepage 850, Macintosh, ISO-Latin-1, Unicode, Unicode/UTF-8.
(At the time, we noted
in our sadly neglected Bitbucket
column on Telepolis that
we were "eager to see a California judge of Latin descent rule on
whether Ámázóñ.nu is a trademark infringement").
Although Nunames' experiment didn't go far, a few similar, scattered
efforts followed. Since those halcyon days, though, the situation has
become more complex -- specifically, it has become more overtly
political.

In November, with a nod
from ICANN, Verisign Global
Registry Services (VGRS) -- the M&Aed registry half of
ex-NSI, as distinct from the registrar half of the split (see
ICANN's summary)
-- announced a "testbed"
involving Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. This was
significant, because it omitted other Asian languages (Thai and Khmer,
for
example) whose orthography is covered in Unicode/UTF-8. Instead of
doing something sensible and truly international -- like working
fairly and squarely within the IETF's developing Internationalized
Domain Name (IDN) framework, or collaborating with the remarkably
international Multilingual Internet
Names Consortium (MINC) -- VGRS jumped the gun by adopting the
backwards-compatible RACE
(Row-based ASCII-Compatible Encoding) kludge, which takes Ginsu knives to the bitstream:
slicing, dicing, and otherwise mungeing 7-bit ASCII into
UTF-compatible encodings.

Why did VGRS do this? Well, money^W I mean marketing
strategies -- no doubt based (generally) on the West's centuries-old
delusional dream of "opening" the fabled markets of Asia to their
warez^Hs, and also based (specifically) on the perceived need to
respond "at internet speed" to certain trends revealed in their
statistical analyses of domain registrations (ZDNet Asia's coverage of
VGRS's surprising stats
can be found here).
But more important than the origins of VGRS's actions are the
consequences; and, as roving_readers surely know by now, in the
N-dimensional looking-glass world of the politics of DNS, tend to be
refractory indeed.

The most obvious immediate result (brought to our attention by Brock Meeks)
was a sudden surge of new domains that when rendered in ASCII
read as bq--3bp25d3prp5yabi.com, bq--3b2tkw2qkvdf5fy.org,
bq--3bixctvloc4q.com, bq--gdpkjl7nxxk4rkx42wr3s.net, and so on. The
"bq--" prefix marks these domains as "multilingual." Whether
registered trademark-holders like BBQ-World of Reno, Nevada, which
could pull a QVC, will
appreciate the complexity of the situation is another story; and British Quizzes could have something to
say about it, too (but only according to the ludicrous logic that
fetishizes "consumer confusion").

The more pressing result was that the VGRS's multilingual
initiative offended China's Middle Kingdom sensibilities In a Big Way
and elicited a ballistic response. Hu Qiheng, the
director of the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), said:

[T]he U.S. government has no right to authorize any company to manage
Chinese domain names with Chinese characters. A company shouldn't be
allowed to provide Chinese domain name registration services in China
without the approval of the Chinese government.

While the roving_reporter isn't especially sympathetic when
it comes to China's
internet-related policies (though the issues are more
complex than most net-heads like to admit), he can only imagine
the orgy of xenophobic raving
that would greet any unilaterally declared Chinese plan to sell and
regulate American things according to Chinese cultural
attitudes (like software,
say). A certain circumspection in these matters is warranted, because
in addition to being national these issues are also cultural.
Thus, CNNIC's director also noted -- correctly -- that

[r]elated Chinese departments have protested to the Internet Corporation
for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that Chinese-character domain
names are quite different from the ASCII (English) ones, since they
have unique...cultural and historic implications

Anyone old enough to grok the roving_reporter's labors of
love will surely remember that ideas like "branding," which of late
have been imbued with pretensions approaching theological dimensions,
are really only a few years old -- and, as such, necessarily are
culturally and historically specific. The very existence of
ICANN's UDRP is itself a clear testament to the fact that the
ASCII-compatible world can barely manage to sort these questions out
(hell, cities like Dallas and
even towns like Salinas
can't); but, this reign of confusion notwithstanding, the idea that
Asian-language (i.e., Asian-cultural and -historical) domains should
be subject to the keystone kourt of ICANN's UDRP globaloney as
interpreted by, say, the likes of NAF arbitrar^Htor James
Carmody (track record here)...
Uh-huh.

China's reaction to VGRS's initiative (which seems to have mellowed
slightly) suggested that, beyond the multilateral model offered
by the organizing ccTLD movement, ICANN's ham-handed endorsement of
VGRS's multilingual initiative might end up precipitating a new
"sphere of influence" approach to the politics of the namespace.
ICANN's dark mantra about what will happen if it fails is puffery:
what better way to guarantee that gummints get deeply involved
in DNS than by poking them in the eye? That ICANN would expostulate
thusly even as it set about trying to undermine the ccTLDs en masse
(see our coverage here and
here) with babble about "trilateral relationships
among governments, their ccTLD organizations, and ICANN"...it doesn't
look good.

But, in keeping with our rather cheerier Ginsu-kinfi motif --
there's more! -- VGRS's RACE-based kludge also seems to have
ruffled some feathers at the IETF. On 13 December, AT&T Labs' John
Klensin published an IETF Internet Draft (draft-klensin-i18n-newclass-00)
boldly -- and, in the roving_reporter's opinion,
brilliantly -- suggesting that the best solution to
multilingual DNS might be to consign ASCII-constrained cruft to the
junkheap of history by declaring a new ("IN") class of data in DNS
records which is UTF-8-multilingualized from the get-go. Klensin's
draft is quite radical, and a must-read; but, for
roving_readers too lazy to klick on a link, the upshot of his
draft is that the installed base of pre-"new-class" software and
hardware (including, potentially, ICANN's fetishized root) could be
reduced to a legacy system.

So now, perhaps, roving_readers will see why the
roving_reporter has been so chary of treating these subjects.

But back to Generalissimo Roberts, whose remarks in Hawaii
seem to confirm the roving_reporter's assessment of the Chinese
debacle: "[ICANN alone] deciding which version of Chinese will be used
to register domains is an easy way to get fired." (By whom? one
wonders.)

Roberts also went on to suggest -- unsurprisingly -- that ICANN
hopes to impose the UDRP on the ccTLDs, when, according to Total
Telecom, he "hinted" about the "possibility of getting our system
of registration into other countries."

If Total Telecom's reportage is accurate, he seems at times
to have taken a rather defensive tone:

Also, every citizen on the Net feels they have been empowered to
challenge what [ICANN does], and I think we should be able to get on
with our jobs without organized undermining of what we're doing.

It's good to finally hear a candid assessment from ICANN about just
how much "bottom-up" support it really has.

As the ICANN
Blog points out, ICANN staff -- possibly including Roberts -- will
be back in Hawaii in less than two weeks for a luau with the
ccTLDs. A hui hou, d00d.

The r_r began as a semi-collaborative nym on the <nettime> list, where it worked well; but the
pseudonym precluded comments, and there was more to report than was
good for the list, so now it -- or a mutation of it -- has
resurfaced on TBTF. [ top]